​The United States men’s national team has exited its own World Cup, and the way it happened—a 4-1 thrashing by Belgium, a side that didn’t even start Jérémy Doku and kept Kevin De Bruyne on the bench for much of the match—has rekindled the same question that looms after every American World Cup cycle. Will any of this leave a lasting impact?
In Seattle, Charles De Ketelaere struck twice in the first half and assisted on a third. Romelu Lukaku added a late fourth. The U.S. men’s national team suffered its fourth Round of 16 exit in the last five World Cups it managed to reach, and it did so on home soil, with striker Folarin Balogun’s red card—suspended, then barely able to return in time—hovering over the outcome. Tyler Adams summed up the sentiment succinctly: “It feels exactly the same.” He acknowledged some positives from the tournament, but concluded that ultimately “it just doesn’t feel like it matters.”
Christian Pulisic, meanwhile, became the focal point of the collective frustration. He was withdrawn midway through the second half after injuring his ankle, finishing a tournament in which he’d already missed one match and left two early. FS1’s Nick Wright dismissed the injury as an excuse, labeling it “unacceptable” for the team’s most gifted player to disappear in the marquee game, regardless of what else went wrong around him. Pulisic, speaking in his post-match interview with Fox’s Jenny Taft, minimized the injury as a sprained ankle and emphasized that he would recover, while noting more broadly that the United States still has “that next step to climb” against the world’s elite.
That is the on-field soccer conversation. The more compelling debate, at least for sports media observers, concerns the audience now that the team everyone watched is no longer in contention. The numbers offer plenty of nuance to suggest this cycle was different. Monday’s match drew a preliminary 30 million viewers on Fox, surpassing the 26.4 million who watched the team against Bosnia and Herzegovina five days earlier and peaking near 37 million late in the game—the most-watched soccer broadcast in U.S. history in any language. Telemundo contributed another 12 million on the Spanish-language side.
That growth is real, and it isn’t negated simply because the United States lost the knockout-round game. The tougher question is what this growth is actually growing into. CNBC’s Alex Sherman highlighted the distinction on social media Monday night, describing a “bifurcation” between the national team’s results—where the U.S. remains far behind the world’s best—and the country’s underlying soccer fandom, which appears to be rising regardless of how the national team performs. Nielsen’s latest fandom research places the U.S. soccer fanbase at 62.5 million people, the fourth-largest in the world, up about 11% over five years. YouGov has tracked a rise in the share of Americans who describe themselves as regular soccer followers, from 8% in late 2022 to 12% now, with the growth driven largely by a broadening interest beyond the national team. This is not a phenomenon tied to a single campaign; it is part of a longer arc of growing engagement with the sport across the country.